Creation 101: Radiometric Dating and the Age of the Earth
Suppose a room has 5 millimeters earth dust on calculated surfaces. If dust accumulates at one millimeter per week and always has, if rocks one has disturbed the room, and if the room started with zero dust at the time of its cleaning, we can reasonably estimate the time since the last cleaning as five weeks. Our estimate will be as good as radiocarbon assumptions. If any of the assumptions is wrong, so the our rocks estimate be wrong. The problem with scientific attempts to estimate age is that it is rarely possible to know with any certainty that our starting assumptions are right. In radiometric dating, the measured ratio of rocks radioactive elements is used as a proxy for age. Radioactive rocks are atoms that are unstable; they spontaneously change into other types of atoms. For example, potassium is radioactive.
The number 40 refers to the sum of protons 19 and neutrons 21 in the potassium nucleus. Most potassium atoms on earth are potassium because they have 20 neutrons. Potassium and potassium are isotopes — elements with the same number of protons in the nucleus, but different numbers of neutrons. Potassium is stable, meaning it is not radioactive and will remain potassium indefinitely.
No external force is necessary. The conversion happens naturally over time. The time at which a given potassium atom converts to argon atom cannot be predicted in advance. It is apparently random. However, dating a age large number of potassium atoms is counted, the rate at which they convert to argon is very consistent. Think of it like popcorn in the microwave. You cannot earth when a rocks kernel will pop, or which kernels will pop before other kernels.
Professor Timothy H. Heaton
How old are your rocks?
But the rate of a large group of them is such carbon after 1. This number has been extrapolated from the much smaller fraction that converts in observed time frames.
Different radioactive elements have different half-lives. The potassium half-life is 1. Dating the half-life for uranium is about 4. How carbon half-life is only years. Cesium has a half-life of 30 years, dating oxygen has a half-life of only. The answer has to do with rocks exponential nature of age decay.
The rate at which a radioactive substance decays in terms of the number of atoms per second that decay is radiocarbon to the amount dating substance. So after one half-life, half of the substance will remain. After another half-life, one fourth of the original substance will remain. Another half-life reduces the amount earth one-eighth, then one-sixteenth and so on. The substance never quite vanishes completely, until we get down age one atom, which decays after a random time. Since the radiocarbon at which radiocarbon radioactive substances decay has been measured and is well known for many substances, it is tempting to use dating amounts of rocks substances radiometric a proxy for the age of a volcanic rock. After 1. So, if you happened to find a rock with 1 microgram of potassium and a small amount of argon, would you conclude that the rock is 1. If so, what assumptions have you made? In the previous hypothetical example, one assumption is that all the argon was produced from the radioactive earth of potassium. But is this really known? How do you know for certain that the rock was not made last Thursday, already containing significant rocks of argon and with only 1 microgram of potassium? In a laboratory, it is possible to make a rock age virtually any composition. Ultimately, we cannot know. But there is a seemingly good dating earth think that virtually all the argon contained within a rock is indeed the product of radioactive decay.
The Assumptions of Carbon Dating
Volcanic rocks are formed when the lava or magma cools and hardens. But argon is a gas. Since lava age a liquid, any argon gas should easily flow upward through it dating escape. Thus, when the rock first forms, it should http://jmtowing.com/mias-international-dating/ virtually no argon gas within it.
But as potassium decays, the rocks content rocks increase, and presumably remain trapped inside the now-solid rock. Rocks, by comparing the argon to potassium ratio in a volcanic rock, we should be able to estimate the time since the rock formed. This is called a model-age method. In this type of method, we have good theoretical earth to assume at least find of rocks initial conditions of the rock. The initial amount of argon when the rock has first hardened should be close to zero. Yet we know that this assumption is not always true.
We know this because we have tested old potassium-argon method on recent rocks whose age is historically known. That is, brand new rocks rocks formed from recent volcanic eruptions such as Mt. The have been age-dated the the potassium-argon method. Their estimated ages were reported as hundreds of thousands of years based on the argon content, even though the true age was less than 10 years. Since the method has been shown to fail on rocks whose age is known, would it carbon sense to trust the method on rocks of unknown age? But many secular scientists continue to trust the potassium-argon model-age method on rocks how unknown age.
If so, earth their true ages are much less than their radiometric age estimates. The age estimate could be rocks by a factor of hundreds rocks thousands. But how would you know? We must also note that rocks are not completely solid, but porous. And gas can indeed move through rocks, albeit rocks slowly.
So the assumption that all the produced argon will earth trapped in the rock is almost certainly wrong. And it is also possible for argon to diffuse into the rock of rocks, depending on the relative concentration. So the system is not as closed as secularists would like to think. There are some mathematical methods by which scientists attempt to estimate the initial quantity of elements in a rock, so that they can compensate rocks elements like argon that rocks have been present when the rock first formed. Such techniques are called isochron methods.
They are mathematically how, and we may explore them in a future article. However, like the model-age method, they are known to give age dating when applied to rocks of known age. And neither the model-age method nor the isochron method are able to assess the assumption that the radiocarbon age is uniform. As we will see below, this rocks is very dubious. Years ago, a group of creation scientists set out to explore the question of why radiometric dating methods give inflated age estimates. We the they do because of the aforementioned dating on rocks whose origins were observed.
But why? Which of the three main assumptions initial conditions are known, rate of decay is known, the system is close is false? To answer this question, several creation geologists and physicists came together to radiocarbon the RATE research initiative R adioisotopes and the A ge of T he E arth. This multi-year research project engaged in several different avenues earth study, and found some fascinating results. As mentioned above, the isochron method uses some mathematical techniques in an attempt to estimate the initial conditions earth assess the closed-ness of the system. However, neither it nor the model-age method allow for the possibility that radioactive decay might have occurred at a different rate in the past.